Here are 71 books that The World Doesn't End fans have personally recommended if you like
The World Doesn't End.
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I have always been a passionate music lover. Music–especially rock–and its creators have always fascinated me. My many adventures include becoming a music journalist, attending hundreds of concerts since the 1970s, and meeting many of my heroes who have since become legendary. This is why I love books that conjure memories or take me to musical moments in time that I have missed. Especially wonderful are the biographies written by or about bands, superstars and people who adore them.
I love this poetic elegy that Patti has written for her dear friend, lover, and comrade—artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It takes place in an exciting time and place—1969/1970s New York City. The city is just like I remember it; scum on the streets, hookers, pimps, rampant crime, triple-X movie theatres. But there is nowhere else these two innocent bohemians would rather be.
I have the updated paperback edition, which includes a magical story about a young writer who read the book. Her mother had acquired Mapplethorpe’s old writing desk at auction. I return to this book often when I need reassurance about deep love and friendship.
“Reading rocker Smith’s account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it’s hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding.” -- People
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence…
These books I’ve traveled with, many I’ve known longer than most friends. They are, indeed, cold but intimate friends. Good company when the world feels rattled and roughed up. I’ve always loved the magic of reading, of going into the mind and onto the universe's outer reaches on nothing more than words. These platforms are for ideas, places, music, and vision. So I take these books with me, fewer than more, for their quality counsel and enlivening entertainment. But like psychopomps or recording angels, they are and always have been a steadfast company on the fast ride of life. I read slowly, and I absorb.
The world may be ending, but something will come in its place. How to see it? How do I engage the senses to feel my way into that next world? Mary Oliver!
Her book is a practice on presence, a workshop on vision and perception. The natural world is a much more quietly exploding landscape of magic after looking through Mary Oliver’s eyes. It’s personal as skin and universal as wonder. I return to it to breathe, to eat. When all the rest has run out, I head Upstream.
One of O, The Oprah Magazine's Ten Best Books of the Year
The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver.
"There's hardly a page in my copy of Upstream that isn't folded down or underlined and scribbled on, so charged is Oliver's language . . ." -Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"Uniting essays from Oliver's previous books and elsewhere, this gem of a collection offers a compelling synthesis of the poet's thoughts on the natural, spiritual and artistic worlds . . ." -The New York Times
These books I’ve traveled with, many I’ve known longer than most friends. They are, indeed, cold but intimate friends. Good company when the world feels rattled and roughed up. I’ve always loved the magic of reading, of going into the mind and onto the universe's outer reaches on nothing more than words. These platforms are for ideas, places, music, and vision. So I take these books with me, fewer than more, for their quality counsel and enlivening entertainment. But like psychopomps or recording angels, they are and always have been a steadfast company on the fast ride of life. I read slowly, and I absorb.
Isn’t this your journey? Home receding farther away the harder you reach after it? I can read this book repeatedly and never feel tired, like I’m covering well-worn ground. How is that? I start the book, and before I know it, I am on the waters, in the cave, longing for home. Aren’t we all? I love it for its language (translated, alas).
Robert Fitzgerald was a great start! But I recently fell in love with Robert Fagle's more American-style version: “The sun sank, the roads of the world grew dark.” At the end of the world, it’s good to remember that the journey never ends. Even when you do get home, a poet is waiting to glorify your boredom and remind you that it’s far more delicious “to shine in use!”
Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem, recounting the great wandering of Odysseus during his ten-year voyage back home to Ithaca, after the Trojan War. A superb new verse translation, now published in trade paperback, before the standard Penguin Classic B format.
These books I’ve traveled with, many I’ve known longer than most friends. They are, indeed, cold but intimate friends. Good company when the world feels rattled and roughed up. I’ve always loved the magic of reading, of going into the mind and onto the universe's outer reaches on nothing more than words. These platforms are for ideas, places, music, and vision. So I take these books with me, fewer than more, for their quality counsel and enlivening entertainment. But like psychopomps or recording angels, they are and always have been a steadfast company on the fast ride of life. I read slowly, and I absorb.
Where do you go when all the political and social circuses have taken the last ounce of energy you can muster? Mountains and Rivers! This is where my book began. In fact, I can still see the cherry blossoms that fell into the central book margin while I read the twisting, turning, makes-meaning-in-any-direction-you-read “Star Guage” by Su Hui.
What mind conceived this brilliance? And West Cove on Orcas Island became miraculously superimposed by the natural world of Wu Wei! The Chinese poets opened a door, and now there’s no going back. The only way forward is The Cabin at the End of the World. Create it! Read it!
With this groundbreaking collection, translated and edited by the renowned poet and translator David Hinton, a new generation will be introduced to the work that riveted Ezra Pound and transformed modern poetry. The Chinese poetic tradition is the largest and longest continuous tradition in world literature, and this rich and far-reaching anthology of nearly five hundred poems provides a comprehensive account of its first three millennia (1500 BCE-1200 CE), the period during which virtually all of its landmark developments took place. Unlike earlier anthologies of Chinese poetry, Hinton's book focuses on a relatively small number of poets, providing selections that…
For four decades, I have written about art for publications in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. I have interviewed, among other artists, Frank Stella, Mary Ellen Mark, Dale Chihuly, Deng Lin (the daughter of Deng Xiaoping), the most celebrated Vietnamese contemporary painters, and the leading Japanese ceramicists. My ideal vacation is to wander the cobblestone streets of Italy, walking into a church to see the art of Caravaggio, Raphael, and Bernini. On a trip to Venice, I saw the immense illusionist ceiling painting by Giovanni Fumiani in the church of San Pantalon. Looking up at angels swirling in heaven, the idea for my second novel was born.
One of my favorite poets writing about one of my favorite artists. Cornell’s mysterious, alluring dreamscapes in his delicately crafted boxes meet their soulmate in the prose poems of Simic. In this work of only seventy-seven pages of short meditations on Cornell’s life, inspiration, and method, Simic creates the poetic equivalent of Cornell’s visual art. Simic recognizes, as did Cornell, that “The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, if recognized.”
In Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic reflects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America’s great artists. Simic’s spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned.
I am a historian of modern Poland. I teach, write, and think a lot about Poland and its place in Europe and the world. Regardless of where I live, Poland will always be my first home, where strawberries taste the best, the forest offers the most calming shade in the summer, and the language sounds the sweetest. But Poland is also a conundrum—perhaps similar to anywhere else and unique simultaneously. Its successes and failures, the traumas it caused and experienced, are part of me, and they keep pushing me to search for people and their stories that help us see the complexity of human life and individual choices.
It’s a short book with 5 essays on displacement, loss, and ways to find a sense of belonging. The stories are personal; perhaps because of that, they touch on something that I think many of us carry in our hearts–a need to reflect on what it means to lose and rebuild a home.
The essays evoke many different themes–the power of movement and starting anew, but also a sense of alienation that even the voluntary wanderers may never lose. We carry the cultures that shaped us within us; as Eva Hoffman, one of the authors, says, “We are nothing more than the encoded memory of our heritage.” And feeling, even if a blessing, sometimes deepens our sense of alienation.
For many of the authors, it’s the language and writing that make sense of the discomfort and find a ‘home.’ It’s a small but beautifully written book and one that inspires…
"Moving, deeply introspective and honest" (Publishers Weekly) reflections on exile and memory from five award-winning authors. All of the authors in Letters of Transit have written award-winning works on exile, home, and memory, using the written word as a tool for revisiting their old homes or fashioning new ones. Now in paperback are five newly commissioned essays offering moving distillations of their most important thinking on these themes. Andre Aciman traces his migrations and compares his own transience with the uprootedness of many moderns. Eva Hoffman examines the crucial role of language and what happens when your first one is…
Growing up, there was nothing I hated more than reading. Struggling with dyslexia and learning disabilities made books miserable and the distractions of screens didn’t help. However, everything changed when I discovered graphic novels and comics! That led to a newfound love of stories and books (especially graphic novels) which took me on a journey of not being able to read at age ten, to publishing my first novel at age fifteen. Since then, I’ve written and illustrated children’s books and young adult novels, but Mup is my first graphic novel. This has inspired me to create more graphic novels designed specifically for those who are just like me – reluctant readers.
This list wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t add a superhero comic. But instead of Spiderman or Captain America, I want to introduce you to Runaways. A middle-grade graphic novel comic series about six Los Angeles teenagers who join together after discovering that their supervillain parents are planning on destroying the world. What could be more fun than a bunch of random teenagers banding together to try and save the world while trying to grapple with their place in it? Dinosaurs, aliens, mutant powers, grocery shopping, crushes, and turning eighteen, it’s a lot to handle and is certainly very fun to read – even for a someone who doesn’t like reading. Plus, if a reader makes it to the end, they’re rewarded with unforeseen plot twists.
They were six normal teenagers linked only by their wealthy parents’ annual business meeting…until a chance discovery revealed the shocking truth: their parents are the secret criminal society known as the Pride! For years, the Pride controlled of Los Angeles’ criminal activity, ruling the city with an iron fist…and now, with their true natures exposed, the Pride will take any measures necessary to protect their organization — even if it means taking out their own children! Now on the run from their villainous parents, Nico, Chase, Karolina, Gertrude, Molly and Alex have only each other to…
I am a creature of habitat. I can’t help but connect with my environment in every possible way. It’s physical, emotional. I spent the first 23 years of my life in Mexico City. Leaving was heart-wrenching, but the promise to fulfill a dream drew me to Los Angeles. During the next four decades I became a student of Los Angeles and the Latino community that populates it. I agree with Randy Newman: I love L.A.
Born in Los Angeles and with profound connection to this city’s psyche, Wendy Ortiz delivers a map of Los Angeles transformed into words, a fragmented memoir of hurt, love, loss, and reinvention. What does a young writer (one of thousands) living in this city and trying to make it worry about? Joblessness. Rent. Bills. Riding the metro. Alcohol. And yes, sex and publishing too, of course. This book proves that it’s not always 72 and sunny in Los Angeles.
Hollywood Notebook is a prose poem-ish memoir of fragments. Ortiz takes us through the streets of Los Angeles and the internal maps she's charting as she moves from her twenties to her thirties in a studio apartment in Hollywood. A cartography of love, loss, and transformation, Hollywood Notebook is a portrait of the author's psyche overlaid on a map of the city she makes her home.
I’m Andy Marx and I am definitely a child of Hollywood. My paternal grandfather was the comic icon, Groucho Marx, and my maternal grandfather was the legendary songwriter, Gus Kahn, who wrote such classic songs as “It Had To Be You,” “Makin’ Whoopee!” and “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” After working as a film publicist on a number of films including, Terminator and Red Dragon, I launched my journalism career writing about Hollywood for such publications as The Los Angeles Times, and Daily Variety. I also co-founded the satirical website, Hollywood & Swine, which poked fun of Hollywood, not a terribly hard thing to do.
This is the third book in the Trip Callaway Gig mystery series written by Phil Swann. While I’ve enjoyed all the Trip Callaway books, I especially like this one because it takes place in 1966 Hollywood. In this story, musician and undercover agent Trip Callaway takes us into the world of Los Angeles studio musicians, who played on all those memorable recordings and variety shows of the time. On top of spending some quality time in great, but sadly long gone, Hollywood hotspots like Shelly’s Manne Hole, The Palomino, and Martoni’s – places I went growing up in Los Angeles – Tinseltown Tango is also a ripping good yarn. If you enjoy a good murder mystery with a dash of music and no shortage of laughs, check out this book. You won’t be disappointed.
Lights, camera, Trip! Los Angeles, 1966. Hot off the heels of his last adventure in Mekong Delta Blues, Trip Callaway, the young, wise-cracking musician with dreams as big as The Golden State itself, takes a break from his steady gig on the Vegas Strip to do some easy undercover work in Hollywood for his secret agency benefactors. It’s Hollywood; how dangerous could it be? But as Trip quickly discovers, The Dream Factory can also be a nightmare. A ruthless gangster, a dubious district attorney, a cantankerous tango band, and a sexy singer from Argentina who elevates the word diva to…
My father estranged himself from his sister because she was an alcoholic. I never met my aunt. However, when looking for a strong character for my Lilian Dove Mystery Series, I decided this aunt was a good mentoring character. Fictionally, I gave my aunt sobriety, but her recovery is not so much from drinking as it is recovering from the past to take on life anew. The mysteries Lillian Dove becomes involved her help her see how to do this. And first, she needs to learn to admit life is full of mayhem. Small-town Iowa amateur sleuth who ends up owning a liquor store.
Joyce Carol Oates is
genuinely an extraordinary author, known for her prolific
output. While some writers focus on series, Oats dedicates her time to
crafting numerous standalone books, each a gem in its own right.
The
plot may appear simple at first glance—a missing sister, and a
protagonist who must piece together the clues to find
her. However, as the story unfolds, the reader becomes immersed in a
web of subtle evidence that gradually weaves together, resulting in a
rich and suspenseful novel. Put the book down.
When a woman mysteriously vanishes from her small town home, her sister must tally up the clues to uncover the truth behind the mystery.
Beautiful sculptor Marguerite has disappeared from her small town in upstate New York. But was foul play involved? Did she merely get away for some fun? Or did she finally make the decision to leave behind her claustrophobic life of limited opportunities?
Younger sister Gigi wonders if the flimsy silk Dior dress, so casually abandoned on the floor, is a clue to Marguerite's vanishing. The police puzzle over the footprints made by her Ferragamo boots, which…